What a great story. I don’t know why I read past the first couple of paragraphs — it’s not the kind of thing I usually care about — but it was gripping.
I think mob stories tend to be gripping. We, especially now so many years removed from the heyday, have a romantic idea about mobsters, always living on the edge. Sure they're on the wrong side of the law, but just barely and they usually keep the violence away from civilians (this is the romantic bit). Some mobsters are bad dudes, yeah, but some are regular Tokyo Joes thrown into a bad situation. It's easy to take t…
TV did that for you. This is another situation where you can prove anything if you ignore enough facts so they just gloss over or ignore all the things that don't fit the story they want to tell.
This is also a classic example of how the "entertainment" industry has been used as a vehicle to shape public perception over the last few decades.
When I was a kid the police shows were Dragnet, Adam-12 etc. The good guys won by following established rules - witnesses report, cops arrest, courts handle trials and convictions, prisons handle rehabilitation/punishment.
Today we see cop shows (firefighter, etc) where the same people who should be making the arrests instead take on the role of executioner. It's been portrayed as okay for a LEO (star of the series) to bend rules and ethical mores, to look the other way when they see one of their own fabricating evidence against someone that is already familiar to them in order to take them off the street, and they routinely ignore constitutional protections when it serves them. The whole idea that cops and courts have these options is one fabricated on your TV screen to help build the narrative that things are bad out there and you need to use all the tools, even the unconstitutional ones, to catch the bad guys because - believe them when they say - there's one around every corner and they're after you.
SV assists all this shit by building tools that they know enable invasion of privacy and near real-time surveillance of everyone who buys a gadget or an app.
In the end, your value to society is measured by what you have contributed in the process of making it better for all of us. For many of you on this site out there you have dug yourselves a deep hole and should begin working on a way to fill it in while there is still time for all of us.